Thursday, 13 September 2012

All this summer fun.
The big waves, and waiting
(the moon is broken)
for the moon to come out
and revive the water. You look
and you want to watch as
men feel the beer breaking
on their lips, and women seem like
the sun on your little back.
Where are you closer to everything?
in the plants? on the photograph or
the little heart that's not
used to beating like the waves' foam?
A wasp is
looking for a hole in the screen.
No. There's no man in the lighthouse.
There's no woman there, but there is
a light there; it's a bulb.
And I think how complete you are
in its light. Flash......... Flash.....
....................................
And I think of how our own room
will smell; You lying on one bed
and we in the other,
facing the... flash.....
.....................Flash

A quick word about the poet, who's not as well known as he ought to be.

Joe Ceravolo, son of Italian immigrants, born in Queens, a civil engineer and regular family guy, was living in New Jersey with his wife and kids at the time he began sending me his extraordinary poems, which were (and remain) like nobody else's. I gratefully put the haunting Stars of the Trees and Ponds in Paris Review #38 (Summer 1966), the amazing Ho Ho Ho Caribou in #44 (Fall 1968), and a number of other poems in my mimeo series Once.

So much is made of whatever in any epoch is thought "new". Later on, the new becomes the old. In most cases. But there are exceptions. Looking back at my review of Joe's 1965 book Fits of Dawn, I can tell that I had not yet caught up with this kind of newness. I still feel that way now.

"Motions of consciousness," I hazarded, "are caught abstractly as gestures, signs, like the cave paintings of primitive hunters that convey profound involvement not by likeness but by inventive strength of form..."

Yes, I agree, that swinging between worlds... English is such a hard and "concrete" language, that sort of fluency is much more difficult to achieve (than in, for example, Spanish).

Ceravolo is a naïf writer in the best sense: he comes to the inextricably intertangled worlds of experience and dream with a child's awed openness and wonder, and brings back his visions without relying on the training-wheels of logic, "appearances" and judgment.

Dear TC: Joe and I were supposed to read together at St. Mark's, and I was very much looking forward to meeting the author of INRI, Transmigration Solo, and Spring in This World of Poor Mutts, all of which I still have, of course. But about a month before, someone called me from the Church to tell me he had passed away unexpectedly. What a terrible loss. (He died in 1988, not '68.) I see that Wesleyan is bringing out a Collected Poems of Joe's in December.

"oak oak / like like"has always rung in my head with my memory of JC's unique and vividly childlike poems first read in those '60s mimeos. You put it so well, Tom, as always, and this one is a lighthouse. I look forward to further flashes.

The moon breaks in little piecesout on the lawn in the grassby the hose where her tonguehung out generouslyshe isa dog that summer of catsscratchy grassand now when I contemplate usinggrammatical drugslike ellipsesI think of her with no crutchesbut paws paws paws.

I did not know there was such a bluein Karlsruhenegative space in the Meadow Sagedeer head outlineor the head of a mutt.

I borrow the wordslook for the fenceto see if I trespassbut in Europe the lawsare differentanyone can walk pastyour placepeer into windowswithout asking.Hereshotgun is readyat the doorpit-bulls and biggerbark with teeth.

You refer to "the nativity of speech" in your review, TC, and this is crucial. What Ceravolos does isn't some kind of tidy representation (telling the moment again). The scene is happening in language at the moment that we read, forever newborn. The words make the beach, the men and women, the wasp and the lighthouse happen; nothing laboured, just breaking in on us like tides and beer and beauty. Without discretion, nothing guarded, the poem is speaking always.

What can be caughtwhat catches (the poet's attention)too many choicesand not each choice buta blind telling

____pain in lingering too longon any one _____shelterat the beachthat day in Francethe blue violet in Karlsruhealmost Frenchgecko's twisting crawllike a muttthe mixfriendlier than the cruel surrealnice to meet you hereMr. Ceravolonicer pastel.

when I got upa short shadow at firstand then a longer onedelicate personbonelessspine and ideasun not in one spotthe wavesWaimanalosoupy anklesfinally dis-covered only it washedback inseaweed man o' warstinging tailsfrom the Azoresfilling stationtame area sleepyby day

Thanks, Tom, for the links to your previous posts of Joe. "Ho ho ho caribou" brought back the most memories, but all are great little Homerics. I don't suppose there is any prose criticism by Joe; his poems stand alone. Berrigan comes to my mind before Koch. But I've always much to learn.